


Imposter Syndrome

by AndreaChristoph



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Canon Divergent, F/M, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-03 20:18:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19471417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaChristoph/pseuds/AndreaChristoph
Summary: One thought kept Flynn going throughout everything - that one day he would come home and his girls would be there, and their happy, wonderful life could pick up where it left off. They'd saved the world, after all, and he deserved that much.He should have known it wouldn’t be that simple.(Or: what if things went exactly as Flynn feared once he got his family back?)





	Imposter Syndrome

**Author's Note:**

> Fic is set after the team defeats Rittenhouse following years of fighting and having succeeded in bringing back all the loved ones they'd lost. Is not compliant with The Darkest Timeline canon. Shades of Garcy but no cheating takes place, in case anyone was worried about that.

It all feels like a wonderful dream at first.

Cutting the crusts off of Iris’s sandwiches. Bringing coffee to Lorena’s bedside before she’s woken up. Resuming their family movie nights every Friday. He knows, for them, nothing is different, but he’d been through the wringer to get to that point, his body littered with scars both figurative and literal that he’d earned in the struggle to bring them back. He eagerly picks up his life where he’d left off so many years ago, and it feels like nothing has changed.

Except he knows that isn’t true, and it’s only a few weeks before the cracks start to show. 

It starts with a trip to the playground. Iris plays on the monkey bars while Lorena stands next to him, chatting idly with other parents, and he smiles as he watches Iris swinging herself around, losing himself in the sound of her delighted giggles. Eventually, she tumbles to the ground, having lost her grip, and when she doesn’t immediately recover he breaks away from Lorena and heads for Iris, intending to help her up. He’s halfway there when he sees a man approach her, hands outstretched, and he immediately breaks into a run. 

The man barely has time to look up before Flynn shoves him away, yelling at him to stay the hell away from his daughter, and the man stumbles back before falling to the ground, staring up at Flynn in a mixture of confusion and fear. Flynn quickly sobers and realizes the entire playground has gone still as they all stare at him, Iris and Lorena included. 

And when Flynn reaches out to help Iris to her feet, he sees his daughter flinch.

That night he tells Lorena he needs a shower, and the noise of the water is thankfully enough to cover the sound of him vomiting, his daughter’s terrified face haunting him all over again, but this time it’s almost worse. This time, the fear in her eyes was his fault.

A few days pass and things almost seem back to normal, and that’s when it happens again. They’re shopping in downtown San Diego for back-to-school clothes when the hair on the back of his neck stands, and he glances around them with feigned nonchalance as Lorena holds up outfits to get his opinion. She notices his attention drifting, and clears her throat to draw his focus back to her. He smiles and nods at her choice, then has that feeling again, a feeling that only gets worse as they walk down the busy street toward their next stop.

He looks over his shoulder for a moment and spots a man a few yards away staring just a bit too long in their direction, and abruptly quickens his pace, gripping both Lorena and Iris’s hands a little too tight as he tugs them along after him. Lorena protests, confused why he’s rushing, and lets out a small yelp of surprise as he pulls both her and Iris into an alleyway, pinning them against the wall and shielding them with his body as he waits for their pursuer to pass. The man does appear shortly afterward - only to grin and hug someone who just appeared from the opposite direction.

Lorena pushes him away, confused and irritated, and takes Iris’s hand. “Garcia, what the hell has gotten into you?”

If only she knew.

The specters of Rittenhouse feel like they’re around every corner, hiding in plain sight, and he goes through his simple day-to-day routine feeling like there’s a constant target on his back. His dreams slowly morph back into the familiar nightmares he’d gotten so used to - finding their bodies, drawing the hair back from Iris’s forehead to see the small hole there, with Lorena on her knees and crumpled forward onto the bed as she was shot in the back of the head, execution style. It was a cold, detached sort of death, just someone doing their job and scratching off names on a paper.

Not even waking up beside Lorena’s peaceful sleeping form is enough to banish the images from his mind, and again he stumbles half-asleep to the bathroom down the hall so he can puke where neither of them will hear it.

He notices when he crawls back into bed that Lorena is half-awake and watching him. He doesn’t speak, pretends not to notice, and lays down facing away from her. Her hand gently touches his back and he squeezes his eyes shut in an attempt to hold back tears, not wanting her to see the cracks in his façade. When she slides closer and wraps an arm around his side, he doesn’t pull away, but he can’t hold it back anymore. She doesn’t say anything, only rests her forehead against the back of his neck and holds him as his body shakes with long, racking sobs.

Life slowly starts to feel surreal. He sits in PTA meetings watching but not hearing, his mind a million miles away - or, more aptly, a million years away, as he often loses himself in memories of all the time periods he’d been to the past few years, memories that somehow feel safe and comforting in a way that his life doesn’t. He shops for groceries with Iris sitting in the cart, staring blankly at boxes of cereal held in each hand while she chatters away next to him, reading aloud from a book to practice. He cuts oranges for her soccer game and manages to slice open his finger, and for a moment he holds his hand over the sink and just watches as the blood drips down over his wrist and into the drain. The brief rush he gets from it makes him feel more like himself than he has in ages, and he smiles faintly before noticing his daughter is no longer playing in the living room and is instead standing in the entrance to the kitchen watching him with wide eyes.

A month goes by with more of the same before Lorena gently coaxes him into seeing someone. He doesn’t know what help a professional could possibly be when he can’t be open and honest about his life, but he agrees to it regardless. As expected, he sits for an hour telling a psychiatrist how many men he’s killed (under the guise of his time served in the army, though he’s not sure that makes it much better) and how much damage he’s done to both the world and his own soul. How he’s so paranoid now that danger is around every corner that he feels like he’ll never be at peace again. 

The only response is pills and a follow-up appointment booked for six months later.

He crumples the prescription in one hand and tosses it in the trash at home. Later that night as he gets ready for bed Lorena comes into the bedroom with the crumpled paper in hand, looking confused.

“You won’t even try?”

“It won’t help.”

“I hate seeing you this way.”

“What way?”

“You think I can’t see it, Garcia, but I do.” She closes the door to the bedroom behind her, not wanting Iris to overhear them. “Something is bothering you.”

He snorts softly. An understatement if he’d ever heard one.

“It’s like you’re...tormented by something.” She takes a step closer and reaches for his hand. “Please, talk to me-”

He pulls away instinctively before she can touch him, and the pain that appears in her eyes rips him in two. He tries to recover, quickly reaches for her, but the damage is done and she’s already moving past him to head for the ensuite bathroom. He hears the lock click as the door closes behind her and the shower running shortly thereafter. When she reappears later and crawls into bed next to him her hair is still dry, but her eyes are not.

They’re called in for a meeting at Iris’s school later that week. He does his best to focus on the matter at hand as the principal, teacher, and guidance counselor all tell them how Iris’s grades have plummeted, how she’d been getting into fights more and more and often had to leave class to go talk with the counselor. She looks at him directly as she lists off the various things Iris has come to talk to her about. They all have a common theme: she’s afraid of her father.

Family therapy begins the following week.

He sits with his arms crossed, silent and gritting his teeth, as Lorena goes over his erratic behavior. He swallows a lump in his throat as Iris quietly talks about how her father feels like a stranger, as if someone took his place. She looks at him meekly, coaxed gently by the therapist to say what’s on her mind, then whispers, “You’re not my dad.”

He breaks down, puts his head in his hands and sobs. God, he wishes he could tell her the truth. He wishes she could understand, that  _ both _ of them could understand. 

But they don’t. They never would.

He drinks to cope, and what is at first a glass of whiskey every few nights soon turns into two every night, and finally he’s finishing a bottle a week. It’s the only way he feels a reprieve from his demons. He knows what a terrible idea it is, knows he should stop, knows it’s just dulling the pain of a wound that can’t heal, and yet when Lorena asks him to stop, he still grabs his jacket and storms out of the house without letting her get a further word in edgewise, slamming the door behind him.

He tries to pretend everything is normal, hoping that if he just tries hard enough, it will be. But he’s still lost in thought during every moment of silence, a never-ending cacophony of noise in his head that he constantly has to try to distract himself from. He’s washing dishes at the sink one day, his mind wandering back to Paris in 1927 and the night that he’d tortured information on the Rittenhouse summit out of Julian Charvet, the sound of his pained cries still as vivid as if it was yesterday, when he feels a hand on his arm out of nowhere. He drops the plate he’s drying and grabs his assailant’s wrist as he turns, his other fist raised to take them down.

The terror in Lorena’s eyes as she looks up at him makes him let go immediately, and he opens and closes his mouth, searching for some explanation, before he flees the house once more. 

He drives aimlessly and ends up at the beach, empty thanks to the cold weather and dwindling daylight, and he stands on the sand and stares out over the water with both hands shoved in the pockets of his leather jacket. The same jacket he’d been wearing that night in Paris, he realizes well after the fact, and he pulls it off and throws it into the water as if it burns to the touch. Then, having glanced around to ensure no one is around to see or hear him, Flynn yells as loud as he can, the pain and rage and heartache easing the longer he shouts. He drops to his knees and slams both fists against the wet sand, then digs his fingers into it as he sits hunched over, trying desperately to feel grounded. Saltwater soaks into his jeans as it washes up over the beach, ice cold against his skin, and he ignores it.

He returns a few hours later to an empty house and Lorena’s car missing from the driveway. He finds a quickly scribbled note on the kitchen island, the handwriting clearly Lorena’s messy script.

_ We’re going to stay with my parents for a few days. - L _

As much as it kills him to do so, he respects her obvious need for space and doesn’t reach out. A few days stretches into a week, which stretches into two. He picks up his phone a few times, wanting to send his wife a text to check on her and Iris, but sets it down each time with the message unsent. A few times he parks a short distance away from Iris’s school and watches as Lorena picks up their daughter, both of them laughing and smiling in a way that he realizes he hasn’t seen in some time.

Finally, after an agonizing month of no contact, Lorena sends him a message asking to meet at a nearby coffee shop. He eagerly agrees, showing up a half hour early with a small bouquet of flowers that he rests on the table while he waits for her to appear. She finally does, her face impassive as she sees him. He reaches for the bouquet, about to hand it to her, when he sees the manilla envelope in her hand.

“I’ve had a lot of clarity over the past month, and...it’s clear this isn’t working anymore,” she says softly as she pulls the divorce papers out of the envelope and slides them across the table to him. Flynn stares down at them, feeling numb, a feeling that only gets worse as she then fishes a pen out of her purse and sets that in front of him as well. “I’ve tried, Garcia, I really have, but...we can’t do this anymore. Iris is terrified of you, you’re refuse to get help, your drinking is out of control, and…” She rests a hand on her other wrist, the wrist he’d bruised as he nearly hit her that night. The bruise had faded, but the pain it had caused her clearly hadn’t. She sighs. “I love you, Garcia, but...this isn’t the man I married. I don’t know where he went, I don’t know  _ why _ he went, but he’s been gone for a long time now, and I don’t think he’s coming back.”

He wishes beyond anything that he could argue with that, but he knows he can’t. He glances helplessly at the flowers before he lifts the pen and scribbles his signature down on the papers, then slides it all back over to Lorena.

“What now?” he murmurs, wishing he could reach out and take his wife’s hand, but she quickly tucks the envelope back into her bag and rests her hands in her lap. 

“I think we should communicate through our lawyers for now. At least until everything is sorted out.”

“Iris?”

“I think it’s better if I have primary custody of her for now. Until you can get some help.”

“You won’t let me see my daughter?”

“No, I-...” She sighs and looks him in the eye. “She doesn’t want to see you right now.”

His jaw clenches. “She said that?”

Lorena nods. “I think she’s just scared and confused. Give her some space, I’m sure she’ll recover soon.”

He watches her depart, then throws the flowers in the trash as he leaves.

He can’t go back to the empty house. It holds too many memories both good and bad, and he knows if he does go back he’ll be plagued with nightmares once more.

Instead, he tosses a duffel bag into his car and drives. He heads north on Route 101 and drives along the coast with the window open, the cold air smelling of seawater and keeping him focused. Hours pass by before he sees the Los Angeles skyline, and he stops only long enough to get a coffee before heading off again. He’s just starting to get tired when he sees the sign indicating San Francisco is only 20 miles ahead.

He pulls up outside of the white-paneled house and kills the engine. It’s late, the sun having set hours ago, but he can see a lamp on in the living room through the large bay window. A few moments later she appears in the living room, glass of wine in one hand and an open book in the other, and she curls up on the couch to read.

He considers for a moment just driving away and disappearing into the night to spare all of them from his damage. But she’d always understood him. She’d only been afraid of him once, on a disastrous night in 1937, and from then on they’d stubbornly butted heads before becoming tentative allies and then finally close friends. Their lives were tied together inextricably through time and history. 

She’s the only thing that feels like home anymore.

He knocks on the door softly, worried she may have others living in the house with her and doing his damnedest not to wake them up. He has no such luck, as a tall, lanky brunette with an unfamiliar face opens the door.

“Can I help you?”

He stares at her for a moment, not saying anything, then finally asks, “Is Lucy Preston home?”

The woman stares at him, an eyebrow arched. “Yeah, just a sec.” She leans back and shouts, “Lucy, visitor!” before heading back toward the kitchen, leaving him standing awkwardly on the front step, feeling exposed in the harsh illumination of the porch light. He hears her ask who it is as her footsteps draw near, but the other woman is already far enough away that she doesn’t hear the question.

The door opens wider, and there she is. 

She looks shocked to see him, her mouth dropping open briefly before turning into a warm grin. “Flynn!” She opens her arms to hug him and he leans down so she can reach. He hugs her tightly in return, a peaceful feeling like he’s not had in some time washing over him as months of tension melt away at her touch.

“What are you doing here?” she asks as she steps back, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I thought you were in San Diego with your-”

“Lorena left me,” he blurts out quietly, cutting her off, and her eyes drift down to his left hand only to see the familiar wedding ring absent. “And she took Iris.”

“Oh no. God, Flynn, I’m so sorry.” She opens the door wider and beckons him in. “Come in, have a seat. Can I get you a drink?”

He’s about to refuse, but instead nods and heads through the doorway she’d gestured to. He sits on the sofa and glances around at his surroundings; despite how long they’d known each other, he’d never actually been to Lucy’s home. He can see what looks like a second living room through the doorway ahead of him and realizes it’s not a living room at all, but a study. A few diplomas hang on the wall, listing out the credentials of one  _ Lucy Elizabeth Preston _ , with a single considerably less ornate diploma tucked in the corner indicating that  _ Amelia Ruth Preston _ had completed a sociology degree. 

Amy. Of course. He knew she’d gotten her sister back, but everything had happened so fast in the wake of the team disbanding that they’d not actually had a chance to check up on each other, to see the new lives they all had.

Lucy returns with a new glass of wine in hand that she hands to him before retrieving her own and seating herself next to him on the couch. He’s silent for a beat, then the whole story tumbles out of him at once, and he feels palpable relief at not having to censor his words or find ways to explain what he’d gone through without saying anything that would get him locked away in a mental hospital. Lucy is silent, listening and nodding every so often, the empathy evident on her face. He recounts the night that was the final straw and his voice cracks, forcing him to pause. He feels Lucy’s hand on his, and threads his fingers through hers without looking up.

“This is why I said I would walk away,” he murmurs. “I said I’d leave, and in the end I couldn’t, and things went exactly the way I’d feared. They’re afraid of me. All of our happy memories are tainted by what I’ve become, and I’m right back where I started. Alone.”

He feels Lucy squeeze his hand tighter. “You’re not alone, Flynn. You can stay as long as you need to. We have a spare room.”

He looks over at her, their hands still clasped. Every muscle in his body relaxes as he takes in her familiar features, the noise in his mind finally going silent.

“You’ll be okay, Flynn.” She offers him another small smile. “Whatever happens, you’ll be okay. Trust me on that, if nothing else.”

He stares at her, the woman who had been his guiding light for so many years, who had given him back his life, who had inspired him and made him want to live again when he was ready to lay down and end it all, and then smiles. “Okay.”

And for the first time in months, he feels like it will be.

**Author's Note:**

> Please note: my views of mental illness do not align with how I presented Flynn's. I absolutely support and encourage seeking out psychiatric help if necessary, and medication can be a lifesaver for some. Thank you for reading!


End file.
